This isn’t a WordPress news site. Our intent isn’t to keep up with the latest happenings in the WordPress world, but sometimes the news is applicable to our jobs. Today is one of those days.
Today, GoDaddy acquired Pagely. Before we get there, though, I want to share briefly about GoDaddy acquiring the company I worked for in October 2020, SkyVerge.
GoDaddy Acquires SkyVerge
In April of 2020, I was hired by a relatively-small startup in the WooCommerce space called SkyVerge. Skyverge was started in 2013 and had been a fully distributed (remote working) company its entire existence. This was something I was looking for when applying for work in early 2020 and SkyVerge sounded like a great company. (Update: it was and still is!)
I was hired to the support team, helping store owners and agencies set up our 60+ WooCommerce plugins. My background developing sites for the previous decade helped me quickly climb to support engineer status before shifting my focus a bit to outward support – reaching out into the WooCommerce community to help people where they are. In doing so, opportunities began to open up to collaborate with the SkyVerge marketing team and my customer support tasks were increasingly replaced with community and marketing ones.
In October of 2020 – after only 5 months at SkyVerge – we were acquired by GoDaddy. To most of us, this came as a shock. GoDaddy hasn’t always been highly regarded in the web industry and we weren’t immediately sure what GoDaddy wanted with our company. It turned out that GoDaddy wanted to combine our WooCommerce plugins, skilled engineering, and elite customer service into a top-shelf WooCommerce offering!
After the initial shock, we got to work. As we began to meet some of the other GoDaddy folks and what they wanted to accomplish – especially in regards to WordPress and WooCommerce – we became more and more confident that the SkyVerge owners had made the right choice.
After more than a year at GoDaddy, it’s clear that the goal is to provide the best products and the best services for our customers. To help facilitate sharing that with the community, I recently moved from the SkyVerge support team to the GoDaddy Pro Field Events and Community team, so you’ll be seeing and hearing from me even more.
GoDaddy Acquires Pagely
Pagely isn’t even the first acquisition since ours in late 2020. Since then, GoDaddy has also nabbed Poynt and Re:amaze – two incredible, customer service-oriented companies. Poynt now powers the GoDaddy Payments offering that includes integration with WooCommerce.
Pagely, along with its best-in-class customer service, closes the gap on something that GoDaddy’s been missing for a while – an enterprise-worthy hosting architecture. With this acquisition comes the knowledge and the team that has been crushing Managed WordPress hosting for years – as they should, since they coined the name!
I’m excited for the addition and for the direction of the GoDaddy company. As always, this will be met with skepticism by some, but I’ve been through this process and truly believe we’re all looking to create the best products and services for our customers!
